{Building the House} Our Vendors

Grace has been amazing. Seriously, I don't know what we would have done without her. If you're going to use a Realtor when building a home, it's really important to find one with experience in new construction since the process is so different. Grace has been immensely helpful to us throughout the process - helping us to understand construction to perm loans and finding a lender, helping us understand the site work and coordinating with the engineer, coordinating with the builder, and of course, helping us through not one but two land contracts. She has really gone above and beyond, and we can't thank her enough! (PS - I'm sure she would be just as fabulous for existing real estate too!)

ANV recommended that we work with Lloyd Ntuk at LAND Engineering. Lloyd has been very flexible, professional, and easy to work with. He's been straightforward in bringing up the issues we've encountered, has happily changed things around based on our preferences (e.g., flip the house around, make the garage side load, put the basement exit on the opposite side).

When we first started thinking about doing this, we started out by approaching our current mortgage lender, Wells Fargo. We were informed that they typically require 40% down for construction loans (40%?!?) and got a flat out recommendation to look elsewhere since they do them so rarely. Grace recommended that we talk to Jeff Starcher at Sandy Spring. Jeff and everyone else we worked with throughout the process was extremely informative, friendly, and eager to help. Their construction to perm loans also had better terms than everywhere else we checked into.